Reading, Writing and Radicalism: Right-Wing Women and Education in the Post-War Years

Abstract

The headlines “Who's Trying to Ruin Our Schools?” and “Danger's Ahead in the Public Schools” grabbed the attention of the American public during the early 1950s as mainstream publications reacted to efforts by right-wing organizations to influence the curricula of America's elementary and secondary schools. “A bewildering disease that threatens to reach epidemic proportions has infected the public schools of America,” warned John Bainbridge in a two-part series forMcCall'sin September and October 1952. “The disease does not attack the body but, rather, the mind and the spirit. It produces unreasoning fear and hysteria.” Bainbridge was writing of efforts of some men, women, and their organizations to censor textbooks; to standardize the curriculum; to eliminate teaching about communism, the United Nations and the workings of governments outside of the United States; and to discredit teaching methods used in both public K-12 schools and in the nation's colleges. These activists also sought to ban those who did not subscribe to a specific way of thinking from speaking before students and at educational conferences and gatherings. As a consequence, in the late 1940s and early 1950s a number of American communities were in an uproar over what the country's youth were being taught, and who was doing the teaching.